News roundup 02/06/25-08/06/25

I read a lot of articles, and often do absolutely nothing with them. This roundup is therefore an initiative set by myself to gather everything I have read in a week into one space, occasionally also adding my own thoughts. Note that as this is the first post of its kind, I will take some liberty and also post some articles published before 02/06/25.

1) The V&A has a new museum! – there is a Picasso-designed stage cloth from the Ballets Russes that I really want to go and see.

2) About the Parisian love for football –

Paris finally acquired a serious football club in 1970, when little Paris FC and Stade saint-germanois merged into PSG. (Paris FC soon walked out again.) At the time, the city’s growing suburbs, the banlieues, were filling with kids who had few entertainments besides football. In new towns short on markers of belonging, millions grew up supporting PSG as a way to feel Parisian. The popular claim that it’s a fake club with money but no fans is nonsense.

3) Janan Ganesh on drinking –
I was mostly dry until the age of 30, when someone poured me a 2005 Châteauneuf-du-Pape, at which point the vintners of London gained a reliable new revenue stream.

4) On Africa’s fastest growing companies – focused mostly in Nigeria and South Africa, I was also surprised by the amount of financial and IT companies. Here is one explanation:

“Asset heavy businesses, including in manufacturing, require much more capital,” adds da-Silva, whose firm invested in Moniepoint, a Nigerian fintech (16th on the list) that has become one of the latest African companies to achieve “unicorn” status.

I also learned about Mozambique’s mining industry:

Mozambique exported its first batch of coal in 2011 and expects to become the world’s largest coal exporter. It is also spending about US$50 billion in infrastructure projects to access its coal reserves. Mozambique is reported to have the fourth largest reserves of natural gas in the world, after Russia, Iran, and Qatar.

5) Rachman on the Musk-Trump fued

6) On Trump’s use of the national guard –

It was the first time since 1965 that a US president had deployed a state’s National Guard without being asked by the governor.

7) Soon we might be having our eyeballs scanned as ID

8) Renault might be helping Ukraine make drones – hopefully they do a better job this time…

The move would mark the first time that the carmaker has manufactured defence equipment since the second world war, when its R35 tanks were used unsuccessfully against German Panzers in the Battle of France.

9) Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is investing less in Europe

Norway’s $1.9tn oil fund is the biggest single owner of European assets, owning on average 2.5 per cent of every listed company on the continent.

But the share of European equities in its total assets has fallen from 26 per cent to 15 per cent in the past decade, mainly because of what it says is falling competitiveness compared with US stock markets and some Asian bourses.

10) Mathematicians are surprised by reasoning models

Book thoughts – Aliss at the Fire by Jon Fosse


Aliss at the Fire is without a doubt the best thing that I have read this year. Fosse invites the reader to the world of Signe, an elderly widow who reflects on the disappearance of her husband Asle twenty years prior. It is as compelling a reflection on grief, time, and love as anything I have ever read.

Central to the novella’s triumph is Fosse’s trademark prose. One is reminded of Bach fugue, with voices entering the narrative not as an additional theme, but instead as an additional layer superimposed upon the whole. Even as one character speaks the murmur of other voices, of other times, are ever present. Heavy use of repetition yields a trance-like reading effect, enchanting and ensnaring the reader alike. Perspectives shift between characters and times at will, often mid sentence. All of this, we suppose, is projected from Signe’s memory as she grapples with her past.

The relationship between Signe and Asle is mute, with the only small glimpses we are offered coming from the hours prior to Asle’s disappearance in the fjord near their home. Their conversations are laboured and unbalanced, with Signe unable to pierce through her husband’s reticence. In an attempt to escape, from what we are never certain, Asle rows daily on the fjord, where in poor weather he eventually meets his death. 

Other characters are introduced as the novella progresses, including Asle’s great-grandmother Aliss. These all follow tangential narrative threads, linking back to the main story via theme and location. Despite their position in the past, in his prose Fosse does not treat them as such; these characters occupy the same narrative time, which is outside of any real time, as Signe and Agnes. They are not merely hallucinations of the past and live and breathe in the same space as the present Signe. 

It is these extra characters, all of whom are distant relatives of Asle, that yield Aliss at the Fire an almost religious bent. Their stories foreshadow and somehow explain the disappearance of Asle. His grandfather’s brother, also named Asle, too drowned in the fjord when he was a young boy. These additional stories not only produce a strong emotive force when treated in isolation, but also when paired with Signe’s grief. Eventually these narrative threads are all focused back to one, with Signe ending the novella reflecting on her own eventual death.

Aliss by the Fire can be read in an afternoon and produces a reading experience unlike anything I have encountered before. Prior to this I read Foss’s Melancholy I & II which while similar in prose style, was ultimately much less compelling a book to me. With only one point of view, the repetition quickly became tedious, and strayed too much on the side of madness. The next work I plan on reading by Fosse is his recent Septology, which by many is considered to be his finest.